http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/featuresopinon/display.var.2502239.0.Is_anyone_capable_of_cleansing_Labour.phpWho, if anyone, will emerge as the conscience of the Labour Party? Who among the party's senior figures can assert, without being laughed at, that the party is nothing if not a moral crusade, as a former Labour leader once so eloquently put it? The party has forfeited moral authority, and is in danger of losing political authority. When both have vanished, ordinary people turn away.
So is there a substantial figure around who can reclaim the party's authority? Someone like Frank Field, a politician I admire, has plenty of moral probity and is not slow to parade his conscience. But he never made the Cabinet and is a marginal figure. What we need is someone pretty close to the heart of government. Since the sad resignation, and then death, of Robin Cook, there has been no-one to fulfil this role with any credibilility.
Or could one emerge in the admittedly unlikely figure of Hazel Blears? The Cabinet Secretary for Communities has been making some interesting speeches lately. Last November, in an extraordinarily presicent address to the Hansard Society, she attacked bloggers who were fuelling a dangerous culture of cynicism and despair. She recently returned to this theme, tilting against the nihilistic, corrosive political climate. Further, she recently complained about the unhealthy number of Labour ministers who have gained jobs in government without having any real experience of the world outside Westminster.
All this was pertinent before the Damian McBride scandal - and is infinitely more pertinent now. Indeed you might ask if Blears knew something she wasn't supposed to know. Except that in her first attack on bloggers, her main target was Guido Fawkes, the right-wing maverick who actually exposed the dirty smears that McBride was planning.
Hazel Blears, is after all, a party animal. She supported the Iraq war and she supports the replacing of Trident. A moral case could be made for both positions but I have not yet heard a Labour politician make it with apparent conviction. Party loyalty and party careers are more important than speaking your mind or following your conscience. That's the problem. If you are inside the tent, serious dissent is unlikely to be tolerated for long. If you are outside the tent, you are a disloyal rebel, and are rapidly consigned to the Westminster dustbin.
Yet things are so grave in the context of Labour's moral standing that someone has to start saying tough things. While Blears has been tentatively and quite bravely picking round the edges, she has not yet summoned the political audacity to make a great prophetic attack on what is sick and cancerous at the heart of our government, and that that is precisely what is needed.
Labour is uneasy not just with its present but also with its past. Its current leader knows the history of his party inside out; that is partly why he helped to reinvent it as New Labour. He knows how its greatest ever orator of the Left, Nye Bevan, came to believe that he had to defend the hydrogen bomb. As the distinguished Scottish journalist James Cameron put it, Bevan writhed on the twin hooks of conscience and expediency. In power, plenty of otherwise decent Labour politicians have writhed on these hooks, and then duly succumbed to expediency. Now, however, some of them have appeared to choose something even worse, and that is complicity in serious, degrading rottenness.
But if this is to be tackled, will the party not suffer as it is cleansed, before it can regroup and renew? Historians of Labour, like Gordon Brown himself, know that the party sometimes seemed happiest when it was fighting itself, rather than the Tories.
So never underestimate the fears that those who understand - and indeed love - the Labour Party always have: that the party might once again start tearing itself apart. The inventors of New Labour were determined that this would never happen again. But it might well have to happen, if the present party is to be genuinely cleansed from the top in London right down to its deepest roots in Scotland and elsewhere.
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